Profiles

The Cleanup Man

Continued (page 3 of 6)

As a big league rookie, Giambi spent off days hanging around the shop of the Bay Area's legendary custom-motorcycle builder, Ron Simms. "Jason didn't really know anybody up here," says Simms, and when Giambi mentioned one day that he was looking for a place to live, Simms offered to put him up in his 8,000-square-foot, $4 million home. Simms told him to park his Toyota pickup (which he'd been driving since he was 16) somewhere far away and loaned him his Ferrari. Somehow Giambi never got around to looking for his own place.

Over the next six years, under Simms's influence, he radically transformed his wholesome image. "When Jason first moved in with me, he said, ‘I'd like to get a reputation that I'm a little bit of a bad guy,'" Simms tells me. Giambi bought his first Harley from Simms, grew a goatee and long hair, and got his first tattoo when Simms's 16-year-old son got his. In July 2000, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover in a sleeveless Simms T-shirt, hair hanging in his eyes, skull tattoo on full display. THE NEW FACE OF BASEBALL read the headline: HOW THE HOME RUN HAS CHANGED THE GAME. They were building Jason as the rebellious new wave of player, and that was the image he wanted," says Simms. "If the pitcher stares down at you and sees a little ink on your shoulder, maybe he's going to think a little differently about you." Giambi took to wearing a T-shirt that read PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR. HAMMER LIKE A PORN STAR. RAKE LIKE AN ALL-STAR.”

Giambi also idolized his teammate Mark McGwire. Susan Slusser, who covered the A's for the Chronicle, says, "People imitating Jason would say, ‘Like I was telling Mark…,' or, ‘Mark told me….' An awful lot of his stories started off that way." Long before BALCO, under the tutelage of Big Mac and A's resident chemist Jose Canseco, Giambi began injecting steroids heavily, or so Canseco claims in Juiced, his tell-all book. (McGwire strenuously denies that he has ever used steroids, and Giambi has called Canseco's charges "delusional.") If true, these allegations would mean Giambi had used performance-enhancing drugs at least four years earlier than the first date he cited in his grand-jury testimony. When McGwire was traded in mid-1997, Giambi made himself into a faithful copy of him on the baseball field, just as he had made himself into a faithful copy of Ron Simms off it. Previously a third baseman and left fielder, he assumed McGwire's old post at first base, then started bashing: forty-three homers in '00 (his MVP year) and thirty-eight in '01.

These may have been the best years of Giambi's life. What Ken Stabler had been to Oakland a generation earlier, he had now become. "He was an icon. He was the Person," says Simms. By day Giambi prowled the infield, by night the bars and nightclubs. When he strode to the plate, the Coliseum's PA system played the sound of a wolf howling. "He knew he was a stud," says Oakland pitcher Barry Zito. "He was the guy that all the young guys looked up to and wanted to be." Reporters found themselves laughing along with Giambi when he joked about overindulging the night before. "It's just so unusual to run into a marquee type of player who is so outgoing to everyone," says Slusser. "He's impossible not to like." One evening, while driving at "outrageous speed" across the Bay Bridge in Simms's car, Giambi and a teammate were pulled over by the police. "The cop looks at 'em and says, ‘Just follow me,'" recalls Simms. "Gets in front of them and escorts them all the way home. Jason walks in, and he's laughing." Life was good in a city with no Page Six.

By midseason of 2001, his contract year, Giambi knew he wouldn't be back in Oakland. Talks with the A's had exasperated him. No "legitimate offer" was ever made, Simms claims, and at the time, he chastised Giambi for not saying so publicly. Negotiations with Oakland supposedly ran aground on Giambi's demand for a no-trade clause, but it has since been reported that A's owner Steve Schott was made skittish by his player's steroid use. Reportedly, Yankees boss George Steinbrenner also knew Giambi was juicing but couldn't resist the lure of a marquee slugger. "That's what Steinbrenner loves," says Don Zimmer, exbench coach of the Yankees. "Home runs."

John Giambi had grown up adoring Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. That meant Jason did, too—even if he was born too late to see the Mick play. At the press conference announcing his signing, Giambi declared that the Yankees had been "my only choice." From behind the lectern, he sought out his father. "Pop," he called out, holding up his number 25 jersey. "It's not [Mantle's retired] number 7—but we got the pinstripes." Then he wept. It was a glimpse into the relationship of father and son, the "we" expressing not just the indivisibility of the dream the two men had shared, but also the sometimes problematic absence of boundaries between them.

The New York papers immediately questioned whether Giambi could adjust to the corporate atmosphere of Jeter's club. Obliging as always, Jason cut his hair, shaved his goatee, and traded in his purple Lamborghini for a Benz. But he may have given up too much of himself, says a member of the New York media, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Do I think he was the most comfortable player in the clubhouse? Absolutely not. I think he was always trying to please everybody, as opposed to just being himself." What Giambi found especially frustrating during that first year, Bastion says, was the clubhouse's joylessness. "He said that everyone has his own agenda. When the game's over, they shower and they leave—boom! Jeter's the first one out almost every time."